“War on Terror” advocates want civilians to die to justify “War on Terror”

6 July, 2009

Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA unit tracking bin Laden.

CIA analyst Michael Scheuer’s recent call for bin Laden to kill more Americans would be shocking if we hadn’t already heard it dozens of times before from other “War on Terror” advocates. “It’s an absurd situation,”Scheuer told FOX News personality Glenn Beck on his program last week. “Only Osama can execute an attack that will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.”

The comments have provoked much shock and outrage among pundits and websites like Jon Stewart and NewsHounds who may have considered him to be on their side. After all, he seemed to be a vociferous and effective critic of the neocons, having authored books like Imperial Hubris and having supported Ron Paul during the 2008 Presidential debates by asserting that 9/11 was merely blowback for American interventionism in the Middle East. With his latest comments, Scheuer is now relegated to the ignoble company of neocon shills likeStu Bykofsky of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who dreamed of another terrorist attack back in 2007 to rally people around the flag (and, presumably, George W. Bush) once again; Donald Rumsfeld, who complained in 2006 that the Bush regime was a victim of its own success in the “War on Terror” and that another terrorist attack was needed to remind people that the war was still necessary; and indeed the entire neocon establishment, who in their 2000 white paper Rebuilding America’s Defenses called for “a catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor” to mobilize the public to get behind their goal of projecting American military influence around the globe for another century. Despite his surprisingly unhelpful attempt to clarify his remarks, Scheuer is now—like all of those who have said that terrorism is needed to bring about political support for their idea—a terrorist himself by very definition.

The “War on Terror”

What seems paradoxical at surface level—that Scheuer is essentially joining the neocons he once opposed in wishing for another terrorist attack—is in fact perfectly understandable at a deeper level of analysis. Scheuer, like the neocons, shares an underlying belief in the “War on Terror” itself: the idea that the U.S. is facing a dramatic and existential threat from radical Muslim terrorists. They may differ in their belief about the motivating causes of this war or the best way to fight it, but that the U.S. itself is at war cannot be questioned. Thus, both Scheuer and the neocons face a shared concern: growing public skepticism taht a “War on Terror” is really taking place, or is necessary.

And so men like Scheuer find a common enemy with the neocons: those who understand that there are radical Muslims who are willing to fight and die for their cause, but don’t believe they would be able to carry off an attack even approaching the scale of 9/11 without the active support of state actors and intelligence agencies. Of course, nothing can convince someone that there is an imminent terrorist threat like a terrorist attack, so those who are convinced of the necessity of the “War of Terror” end up hoping for terrorists to strike down some of their fellow countrymen so they can get back to fighting over how best to wage the war.

Worryingly, it is a remarkably small leap from the conviction that a new terrorist attack would be helpful to the decision to provocateur or stage just such an attack. While it remains doubtful that Mr. Scheuer would ever entertain such thoughts, the same cannot be said of some of his less scrupulous compatriots. Even Zbigniew Brzezinski warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2007 that a terrorist attack was likely to be staged in order to provide the Bush Administration with a pretext for attacking Iran. Nor is this concern over false-flag terrorism merely hypothetical. It is already official government policy.

In 2002, Rumsfeld oversaw the creation of a new strike force in the “War on Terror” called P2OG. Short for Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, it was a body bringing together CIA and Pentagon teams to combine military, technical and intelligence capabilities. The group’s responsibilities include “‘stimulating reactions’ among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction—that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to “quick-response” attacks by U.S. forces.”

In effect, Rumsfeld and the DoD decided that it was worth letting some civilians die in order to flush the terrorists out. The enormity of this revelation was not lost on Chris Floyd of Counterpunch: “Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and the other members of the unelected regime in Washington plan to deliberately foment the murder of innocent people—your family, your friends, your lovers, you—in order to further their geopolitical ambitions.”

Again, it is important to note that the idea of provoking terrorists into acting or allowing innocent civililans to die so the “War on Terror” can forge ahead is not speculation or fantasy. It is an official government strategy. And it was implemented in Iraq.

U.S. and British Staging Terror in Iraq

During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the British Army set up an intelligence unit with the throwaway name Force Research Unit (FRU) to implant moles into every level of the IRA. Kevin Fulton was one of those operatives in FRU, providing inside intel on IRA operations to his handlers; intel, he was assured, that reached all the way to the Prime Minister’s office. He caught wind of the 1998 Omagh Bombing in advance and warned his handlers 48 hours ahead of time that an attack was about to take place. The decision was made not to stop the attack because to do so would have meant blowing the cover of one of their high-ranking IRA moles. Consequently, nothing was done and the bombing went ahead, claiming the lives of 29 civilians and injuring over 300. In the wake of the attack, the disgraced FRU became known as the Joint Support Group (JSG) and was redeployed to Afghanistan and Iraq to transplant their ‘anti-terror’ techniques to the streets of Baghdad and Basra. (See this article for the FRU/JSG story)

In 2005, these SAS officers were in a shootout with Iraqi police and broken out of jail by British tanks.

In 2005, British SAS officers dressed up as Arabs got into a shootout with Iraqi police. They were subdued, and their booby-trapped car, laden with ammunition, was seized. Rather than explain what the SAS officers may have been attempting to do, the British sent in six tanks to free the two prisoners from an Iraqi jail. (See the full story here).

In 2006, the dome of the Al-Askariya Mosque, one of the most important Shia Mosques in the world, was ripped apart by a bomb. The Sunnis had nothing to gain by staging this attack and inflaming the Shi’ite community in Iraq, but an increase in sectarian violence is the expected result. At the time, 27 year CIA veteran Ray McGovern said he believed western intelligence may have been behind the bombing. When the Mosque was bombed again the following year the Iraqis outright accused the U.S. ofs having done it in order to promote sectarian strife and keep the region Balkanized.

Just this year, intelligence analyst and investigative journalist Wayne Madsen revealed that American intelligence has been sending Afghan mercenaries into Iraq in order to kill and terrorize the local civilians and even American military.

Such stories, of course, are completely counter-intuitive, even nonsensical, to the average mind. When the P2OG game plan of provoking terror in order to fight the terrorists is revealed, however, it makes sense. This is the warped logic of one who succumbs to the idea that terror attacks are necessary to help protect us from terror.

The False-Flag Mentality

To say that there is no difference between musing about an attack to imagine its possible “beneficial” consequences and actually making that attack happen would be wrong. But to say that such a leap is unfathomable or without precedent would be equally erroneous.

With P2OG in our own time and Operation Northwoods half a century ago, the American military has shown that it is willing and able to commit acts of terrorism in order to “win” a greater war. It would be a disservice to our country if we were not to question our leaders when they come up with plans of such unspeakable moral bankruptcy, and it is equally necessary to rebuke those who start down this path of reasoning by declaring the necessity or helpfulness of a terrorist attack. Once one has made that decision to welcome terrorism for its transformative political power, one has opened the doorway to false-flag terrorism and the sacrifice of innocent civilians.

Perhaps it is no surprise that Glenn Beck seemed to hardly even blink as Scheuer made his outrageous comments. Beck himself seems to share in this false-flag mentality whereby the trauma of a major terror attack is actually something to rejoice in (cf. his entire “9/12 Project” premise). It can only be hoped that when and if a commentator is to make such thoughtless and potentially terroristic comments as those made by Scheuer (and Bykofsky and Rumsfeld) the interviewer will have the wherewithal to call them on it.